For all its skepticism over artificial intelligence, Generation Z looks to the technology to help answer a big question: where to go to college.
Nearly half of U.S. teens go first to AI-generated summaries when they explore higher education options, according to our research at Carnegie. Our Next Gen Learners survey of more than 3,300 students nationally turned up new dynamics, with AI overviews often informing perceptions of individual colleges and universities before young adults click to institutional websites.
The trend marks a critical entry point for schools making their case in one of the most competitive enrollment markets in decades. As AI becomes central in online habits, institutions that best understand and employ these tools stand to gain the most not only with enrollment but also in long-term standing and stability.
So how to strategize when answer engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search experiences evolve so rapidly? Higher ed marketers may be tempted to prioritize either paid advertising or their organic presence in AI-generated query responses. And even if they pursue both avenues, they tend to do so in silos, operating from different departments in separate units of their institutions. After all, paid ads and in-house content development can be distinct worlds in higher ed communications. But operating this way is an unforced error that risks missed opportunities in our AI era.
The Promise of Collaboration
A common misperception is that answer engines may undermine paid search. In reality, conversational search experiences are incorporating ads, so paid search is becoming more integrated in the answer-driven journey. Robust institutional visibility in answer-engine results is just as crucial, given the power of first impressions. Strategic schools craft engaging, in-house web content tailored to win attention and traceable clicks in AI-generated answers. The practice—called answer-engine optimization, or AEO—is the latest cousin of search-engine optimization, a staple of online publicity practices since the mid-1990s.
In this layered environment, colleges and universities have an immediate opportunity to coordinate and evaluate paid and AEO strategies across disparate internal teams. Their objective should be to drive both the AI-produced answers and the ad content around them.
Such collaboration starts with a shared foundation. Each team—the AEO-focused group and the paid-search group—should have at least a basic understanding of the other’s discipline and contributions to the student journey. With that exchange as a baseline, a school can better identify practical ways these two pillars can aid one another. Prompts and topics tracked through AEO can influence search targeting, messaging and web pages. Paid-search data, on the flip side, can reveal programs and topics where competition and costs are most intense.
This range of information helps the institution determine where and how to invest in paid strategies and its own web content. Consider a school that’s paying heavily to elevate a priority topic. A better AEO presence may reduce dependence on paid media. In other cases, paid search creates quick visibility as a school improves its web pages and organic authority over a longer term.
Pilot efforts are especially useful to test coordinated strategies. A pilot can start with one or two priority initiatives, comparing paid search terms, AI prompts, visibility gaps and costs. Its findings can inspire a repeatable model for other programs to strengthen coverage through AEO and plug gaps through paid search.
If this dual-pronged sensibility rings familiar, it should: Top-performing schools have long known that traditional SEO and paid search are most effective together. Well-executed AEO capitalizes on foundations set by SEO, leaning on similar principles to grow reach and interest in a more evolved digital landscape.
Disparate Gauges of Returns
In a tight budget environment, higher ed marketers face pressure to justify every budget line. But not every expense shows its worth the same way.
Paid search demonstrates value directly. When an institution pays for a click, it sees right away the action that follows. Tracking the paid investment to inquiries, applications and enrollment is a straightforward assessment. It makes the return on an investment a simple, readily defensible calculation.
Precise outcomes of AEO are harder to document. The full impact of AI-generated answers is broad—and fuzzy—as prospective students who form first impressions in virtual chats often find their way to an institution later through other channels. Those other channels are difficult to link back to original investments in AEO-juicing organic content.
AI conversations may receive little direct credit for less trackable successes, but schools that skip AEO exclude themselves from an essential device. Until technology generates more comprehensive tracking mechanisms, marketers will need to live with inexact evaluations of AEO outputs.
Ideal Outcomes
So, let’s imagine the ideal: A prospective student engages Google’s AI Mode to look into colleges, ask questions and have a conversation that informs where to apply. AI cites an institution’s own content, built on strong SEO foundations and a rich AEO strategy. Alongside the earned content, a paid ad, tailored to the conversation, shows next steps for applying.
The institution has dominated the experience, influenced perception and established a path to action, all within a single conversation. Fundamentally, this represents the evolution of that decades-old practice—owning a search-results page with SEO and paid search—through fresh technology.
As tools mature, blending AEO and paid strategies offers more than many marketers realize. Teams that find and explore these synergies will outperform those who don’t. And those acting early will seize a valuable edge over the competition. The goal should be coordinated presence at each moment of a college search. Every day of visibility is another step ahead of the curve.
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